


Redemption

by doctorenterprise



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst with a Happy Ending, Catholic Guilt, Catholic Steve Rogers, Character Study, Depression, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mentions of self-harm, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Self-Worth Issues, Semi-Public Sex, very brief but keep it in mind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-26
Updated: 2016-06-26
Packaged: 2018-07-18 11:15:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7313005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorenterprise/pseuds/doctorenterprise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve’s looked into the wild blue of his best friend’s eyes every day of his life and thought <em>I will sink us both<em>.</em></em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Redemption

Steve’s looked into the wild blue of his best friend’s eyes every day of his life and thought _I will sink us both_.

He’s spent his entire teenage life laying side by side in a too-small bed while his skin crawls with the knowledge of what he wants to do to his Bucky. Suffered in pained silence with eyes closed tight against visions of smooth skin and the taste of salty sweat in a New York summer. Clenched his fists against the desire to reach across the small expanse of sheets and touch, feel, _hold_.

He’s no stranger to the way his tongue tingles and his mouth waters with nausea when he sees that smirk – always, _always_ – accompanied by a calloused hand through carefully styled dark hair. God, how it’s always made him want, want like he’s never wanted anything before.

He thinks _Lord, grant me redemption_. He knows he doesn’t need it. He finds it every day in the curve of Bucky’s jaw, the slope of his shoulders, the sound of his voice ten seconds after his eyes open each morning. He knows there’s nothing in this world that can save him from himself, but God, Bucky’s the closest he ever expects to get to heaven.

He knows in his heart that he’s never seen anything so beautiful in his life and never will again. Light shines out of Bucky and fills whole rooms. He’s the most beautiful thing Steve’s ever seen. There’s no way he’ll ever be more perfect.

Steve’s wrong. _So_ wrong.

Bucky steps into an alley and kicks some jerk in the seat of his pants for taking a swing at Steve and Steve’s poor heart –

It breaks and soars all at once.

Bucky swings an arm around Steve’s shoulders and Steve...Steve tries so, so hard not to follow the smart line of Bucky’s torso in military dress with his sinful hands. He thinks _this is it_. This is the best version of Bucky there is.

He’s wrong again.

There’s a version of Bucky – Steve’s pole star, his tether to the earth, his one short glimpse into the face of God – there’s a version that looks at Steve with tired, red eyes set in a face too hollow with starvation and stress. There’s a version that licks his lips over a glass of whiskey and asks Steve if he’s keeping his tight little outfit. Looks at him like a starving man looks at a feast, a drowning man looks at land, a good man looks at his wife.

There’s a version of Bucky whose eyes catch on Steve’s arms and hips and strong jaw. A version that makes Steve think _maybe we don’t sink at all_. Maybe they swim together.

There’s a brief moment on a mountain by a river in a tent at night where Bucky tells Steve _I’d die without you_. A moment when Steve’s heart beats too much and not at all his skins feels like fire and ice and Bucky’s rough right thumb catches on Steve’s chapped bottom lip – just for a second, the longest and slowest of Steve’s life.  

Bucky’s eyes are dark and his lips are shiny with spit and Steve thinks I _’m two steps from heaven’s gate_. And then Morita’s at the tent flap and Bucky’s across the small space in an instant, cheeks shame-flushed and mouth set in a hard line, and Steve...Steve’s heart breaks for the thousandth time.

This war, he thinks. This goddamned war.

When it’s over, he thinks. When it’s over, he’ll show Bucky he doesn’t have to be ashamed. When it’s over.

When it’s over, Bucky’s body is at the bottom of a mountain and Steve’s heart, his broken, battered heart, lies there with him.

Two days later, he thinks _I’d die without you_ and puts a plane in the ocean.

Seventy years later, he wakes up in a brave new world and thinks _I can’t live without you._

He lives, he does, but it’s tainted and grey. He’s feels his heart barely beating in his barren chest and his lips turn down more often than up. He wakes and grieves and fights and can’t look his fellow soldiers in the eyes without seeing the dregs of a memory in them.

Sees Bucky’s laugh in Thor’s bright, open face. Bucky’s stubborn jaw stuck out determinedly in Tony’s barely cloaked insecurities. Bucky’s gentle nature in Bruce’s soft eyes. Bucky’s fierce protective side in Natasha’s stoic face. He looks at them and sees everything he’s ever loved and lost and he keeps his distance because _I didn’t sink us both._ _I will sink us all_.

Their whispers follow him around the ugly testament to human ego Tony calls a tower and he soaks himself in the knowledge that they don’t love him. They think he’s stern, cold, and aloof. He’s glad, so glad. They think it’s because he disapproves of their world, but they have no idea. Given half a chance, he would ruin them all.

They don’t know he’s feasted his eyes on the purest form of beauty the universe has to offer and chose to drag it into the depths of hell. They don’t know what he sees every time he blinks.

He dreams, oh, how he dreams. Nights are flooded with the cut of an army green jacket across broad shoulders, soft light from an oil lantern easing stress lines on a beautiful face, a gentle grip on the single delicate china teacup Bucky’s grandmother left him...just pieces, just memories because it’s all that’s left and more than he deserves.

He gets on his knees every damn days and prays they’ll ever understand what it’s like to have loved and lost like he does, to have the world just outside his grasp only for it to fall away the moment he stretches to catch it.

Tony tells him they are not soldiers and he thinks _thank your goddamn lucky stars_ . He thinks _maybe not yesterday_ . He thinks _have a little respect_ . He thinks _I wish you weren’t_.

He presses his lips together and says nothing.

He watches them learn to fall in line and it breaks his heart. He watches Natasha’s shoulders set more firmly with every life she ends. He watches Bruce sink further into science in search of an escape. He watches Tony lose sleep and friends and sanity as he falls apart. He meets Thor’s eyes and feels it in his veins when he recognizes someone who wants none of what they’ve experienced for their friends. Clint is the only one who seems to manage his pain.

Steve is jealous.

He meets Sam on a Wednesday in Washington and feels a whisper of a feeling in his chest when Sam smiles at him. He follows Sam home like a lost puppy – a broken, angry, hollow puppy – and smiles weakly at him over three bowls of Cheerios and a carton of orange juice.

Sam teaches him to consider living for a life instead of living for a war.

He’s seen Sam three times before Nick Fury bleeds out on his carpet courtesy of a man with a metal arm. SHIELD tries to kill him with his own STRIKE team and an armed jet. He spends thirty minutes in Sam’s shower digging bloody holes into his palms and struggling not to cry.

When he joined SHIELD he thought - he thought – he thought –

He was wrong.

He cries anyway. His palms heal before he turns off the water and goes to war again and he knows he’s ready.

Natasha takes a bullet in a fight that doesn't belong to her and he’s angry, so angry, so guilty all the time and the man with a metal arm delivers absolution with every blow.

He fights with everything he’s got – he’s going to get them out, get them all out, and they’re never picking up another weapon again, he vows. He’s tried too hard to save a world that can’t be saved. It’s time it saves itself.

He throws the man with the metal arm to the ground and when he gets up – when he gets up, he’s wearing Bucky’s face.

Bucky’s _face_. Strong jaw, sharp cheekbones, straight nose, brilliant blue eyes. A face he never thought he’d see again, not in this life or the next.

He thinks _is this heaven after all_ ? He smells gunpowder and knows it’s not, it can’t be, because he would never have been ushered through those gates. He calls out – his voice is barely working, his throat feels block and his tongue is numb – and the man, Bucky, he says _who the hell is Bucky_?

And Steve’s heart – impossibly – breaks again.

This time, when Bucky slips from his fingers, Steve refuses to let go. _I will not sink you again._  

He finishes the fight he meant to finish half a lifetime ago. He doesn’t put a plane in the ocean this time, he puts three in the Potomac and he does it without hesitation because Bucky...Bucky has endured a punishment meant for Steve and that is the greatest injustice of this shiny new world. He doesn’t know much but he knows he’s fought for an organization that pulled his best friend’s brain out and picked it to pieces for their own selfish gain.

He’s going to put it back where it belongs and he will scorch the earth before he allows another hand to smear the only version of Bucky left walking its surface.

The aftermath is messy, it’s dangerous, and the dust doesn’t settle neatly. Steve’s friends – his team – let him slip into the background and he hunts, hunts, hunts for a trace of the man he owes his life. 

It doesn’t take long.

Tony’s army of Harvard lawyers keep any of them from serving time and Steve is glad, so glad, because he’d have been happy to rot eternally in a cell six months ago but he has a purpose now and he won’t stop until its been fulfilled.

Bucky finds him on a Wednesday one week after they all walk away from the rubble of the world the brought crashing to its knees.

He falls into step beside Steve on the way home from the grocery store and takes half his bags like it’s something he does every time.

Steve stares up at the sky with Bucky by his side and thinks _it can’t be this easy_ . He thinks, _I deserve less than this._ It’s not that easy, it’s not easy at all, because Bucky wakes him in the middle of the night with an iron fist around his throat and he thinks, _this will be my penance._

It’s a long, hard year.

Steve feels like he’s fifteen again, lying in a small bed touching shoulders with a beautiful boy and feeling sick to his stomach because it’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s not fair and it’s wrong. He turns his head and sees wide, beautiful eyes looking back at him, same as they used to, and he has to close his own lest Bucky see what’s behind his lids. He and shame become well-acquainted once again and he forces himself to feel it because to not feel it would be so much worse.

Bucky struggles every day to come to term with the man he was, is, and will be. Steve feels like an imposter for thinking he’s in pain when Bucky is lost, broken, a man in limbo between too many shaky memories. He thinks _he has it so much worse_.

It takes a year of sobbing in the shower, gritting his teeth against the rush of blood he feels at the sight of Bucky in sleep pants, dropping everything because Bucky asked for something and how could Steve not give it? After everything he’s done? After everything he _hasn’t_ done?

The only truth left in the world is that Steve owes Bucky a lifetime. Of what, he has no idea.

He learns that the booze Thor brings to earth with him is an easy way to avoid thinking about the way the muscles in Bucky’s back bunch and shift when he works out, about the way two days of stubble looks like heaven on earth, about the way Bucky’s warmth against his back has him hard in his jockeys every single night. He wants, he was so much, and two fists gripping sheets and teeth clenched together in the night are as close as he can get to begging for forgiveness.

He joins his team, his friends, when they go out because it’s the only time he can breathe. He’s is love but it doesn’t matter because the music is loud enough to stop his thoughts before they form.

He knows heaven is too far beyond his desperate reach. He learned that in the seventh grade when he wrapped his hands around his cock and choked down Bucky’s name, shame-filled in his bed late at night. The sight of Bucky with his hair loose around his face, dressed in twenty-first century clothing, hands above his head and hips moving to something with too much bass and lyrics too suggestive is as close as he’s ever going to get.

He watches Bucky dance and thinks _I’m just drunk enough_.

Bucky’s back is warm against his chest and his stomach is hard beneath his palms. The feel of Bucky’s hands finding their way into his hair, of Bucky’s hips pressing back into his, of Bucky’s shoulder beneath his lips – it’s so much more than enough.

He thinks, _if I can just have this moment_.

But Bucky turns around in his arms, rides his thigh like he’s desperate for it, and shouts _I want to make you scream_ in Steve’s ear. They don’t make it to a bathroom stall. Steve’s spent his whole life wanting, wanting, wanting and instead they find a stool at the bar and Steve presses Bucky into it and they grind together until they’re gasping into each other’s mouths. Steve doesn’t know if anyone notices their rutting and he doesn’t care – Bucky’s gasping hot puffs of air into his mouth and he’s got a hand down the back of Steve’s pants dragging him closer.

_This_ , Steve thinks. _This is it_.

He’s two hot seconds from coming when Bucky’s hips stutter and he groans long and deep in Steve’s ear. Steve follows him over the edge, gripping too hard and whispering too many truths.

Tony smacks him on the ass and shouts _go get ‘em, tiger_ and Steve feels so alive. Tony shouts about arriving in the twenty-first century in style, fucking in public and not caring who sees, totally unaware of the religious experience Steve is having in Bucky’s arms.

At home, Steve strips them both bare with trembling reverence. He stares for an eternity until he’s desperate to touch, touch, touch and when he does - when he does, he _worships_. Bucky is his glimpse into heaven and Lord, save him, he’s going to take everything he is offered and he’s going to treasure it.

Bucky whispers _I love you_ with his hands on Steve’s shoulders and Steve’s lips on his sternum and Steve weeps. He weeps for years wasted and years stolen and years to come.

He’s spent his life loving Bucky Barnes from too large a distance.

He remembers thinking _I will sink us both_.

He knows better now. He kisses the newest version of Bucky gently and thinks _you will keep us afloat._


End file.
